Business analytics and decision making

Business analytics as an interdisciplinary field of study includes methods, processes and software systems that extract insights from various forms of structured and unstructured organisational data to enable evidence-based decision making. Business analytics are increasingly becoming an indispensable tool to assist both public and private organisations in understanding their inner complexity and to enable more informed decisions, both at the operational and strategic level. It has emerged as a major area of emphasis within information systems, where focus is on the application, uptake and impact of business analytics in organisational contexts.

Within this theme, our research focuses on the following research pillars:

Business process analytics

Business process analytics looks at how descriptive, predictive and prescriptive analytics can be used to detect issues affecting the execution of business processes and identify possible remedial actions.

Sample projects

• Business Process Drift: Detection and Characterization (Alireza Ostovar, Marcello La Rosa)
• Explainable Predictive Monitoring of Temporal Measures of Business Processes (Ilya Verenich, Marcello La Rosa)

Competitive advantage of analytics

Competitive advantage of analytics looks at how organisations can gain competitive advantage with analytics by gaining insights on their data, improving an organisation’s decision-making capability.

Sample projects

• Stages of Maturity in Business Analytics (Ranko Cosic, Graeme Shanks, Sean Maynard)
• Using Business Analytics to Improve the Agility of the Supply Chain (Mohammad Moniruzzaman, Sherah Kurnia Sean Maynard)

Security analytics

Security analytics looks at how analytics can support an organisation’s information security through using data to improve situational awareness in the areas of incident response and risk management, leading to better, evidence-based information security decisions.

Sample projects

• Using Security Analytics to improve Risk Management Decision Making (Humza Naseer, Graeme Shanks, Atif Ahmad, Sean Maynard)
• Using Security Analytics to improve Situation Awareness (Humza Naseer, Graeme Shanks, Atif Ahmad, Sean Maynard, Sandeep Godbole)